VC money flowed plentifully into the security market last year, fueling a new crop of innovative companies.

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In spite of a slowdown in the overall funding activity from venture capital firms in 2016, the cybersecurity market continued to raise money at full steam. Last year saw the market break records in terms of funding deals, with Q3 tallying up to be the most active quarter for deals in cybersecurity in the last five years, according to CBInsights.

That influx of money is driving innovation in a number of areas. Particularly notable market segments targeted by these firms include security for data centers and public cloud infrastructure, security orchestration and incident response tools, and third-party risk assessment tools.

The following 20 firms are primarily early- to middle-stage startups, with a few more mature start-ups that have courted growth equity to change course or expand into a particularly hot new market segment. We believe these firms are worth watching due to several factors. On the funding front, they either managed to snag $25 million or more in funding in 2016, or garnered a notable funding round within the last three months. Many of these firms have been founded in the past three years and a number of them are notable for acting as first-movers in a particularly hot security niche. Additionally, a number of the firms are notable for their leadership by security veterans and visionaries.

In the interest of bringing some new blood to our annual spotlight on startups, we’ve included only companies that were not already featured in our lists in the last two years.

Ericka Chickowski specializes in coverage of information technology and business innovation. She has focused on information security for the better part of a decade and regularly writes about the security industry as a contributor to Dark Reading. View Full Bio